Attention and Inattentional Blindness

Learning Objectives

  • How is “seeing” not just something the eyes do?

  • What is inattentional blindness?

  • Why was inattentional blindness surprising to perception researchers?

  • How is attention relevant to health & safety?

  • What is change blindness?

  • Occipital Lobe

Our Minds Construct Reality

  • Our minds actively construct our perception of reality, rather than passively receiving it.

Inattentional Blindness

  • Study by Boger, Most, & Franconeri, 2021: "Jurassic Mark: Inattentional Blindness for a Datasaurus Reveals that Visualizations are Explored, not Seen"

  • Filtration Task

  • Demonstrates inattentional blindness for a datasaurus.

Why We Need Attention

  • Each moment contains more information than we can possibly take in, necessitating attention to filter and select manageable chunks.

Attention

  • Attention is a family of cognitive mechanisms that help us select manageable chunks of information.

  • William James (1890) definition: Attention is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.

  • Inattentional Blindness (Mack & Rock, 1998):

    • Failing to notice what you are looking right at when your attention is preoccupied (Simons & Chabris, 1999).

  • eye trackers record what people look at:indexes overt bt not covert attention

  • people who didn’t see unexpected item looked at it as often as those who did

  • high visibility clothing does not really work

Visual Search Task

  • Find the slanted line.

  • Find the red line.

  • The idea that some basic features don’t need attention to be seen (visual pop-out).

  • Find the green slanted line.

  • Targets that combine basic features need attention.

Visual Search Task

  • Conjunction Search.

  • Feature Search.

  • Visual Pop-out.

  • Visual search slopes.

Feature Integration Theory (Treisman & Gelade, 1980)

  • Anne Treisman (1935-2018).

  • Certain basic features are processed quickly in parallel.

  • Attention serves to bind simple features together.

  • This binding process is slow and serial.

Spatial Attention

  • Directing attention to a specific location in space.

Feature-Based Attention

  • Attend to either white or black L's and T's.

  • Unexpected items: white, light gray, dark gray, black.

  • What you see is what you set.

  • Most et al., 2001.

  • Most & Astur, 2007.

  • Attention favored either yellow or blue.

Collisions: Role of Attentional "Tuning"

  • Match vs. Mismatch conditions.

  • Most & Astur, 2007.

  • Transportation Safety - ODOT.

  • Share the Road. The Way to Go.

Change Blindness

  • (Simons & Levin, 1998).

  • Bar, 2004.

  • We quickly extract the gist (general meaning) of a scene, but not its details.

  • Our understanding of its gist guides and shapes what we see.

  • We’re very bad at noticing even large changes.

  • Failure to update representations between views.

    • Failure to see something we’re looking at

    • Occurs because attention is preoccupied.

  • Perception is sparse.

[RoadAds Chief Operating Officer]: “For a billboard you have got to look at it. Here as a driver, it’s in front of you, your eyes don’t leave the road.” – The Daily Telegraph, 5th August, 2014.